What Was Velociraptor Really Like? Turkey-Sized, Feathered and Nothing Like the Film
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The animal that opens kitchen doors in Jurassic Park stands two metres tall, has scaly skin, hunts in coordinated packs and is called Velociraptor, and the animal that the name belongs to weighed about fifteen kilograms, stood knee-high to a person, was covered in feathers, and lived in the deserts of Mongolia seventy-five million years ago. The film's raptor was modelled on a larger American cousin, Deinonychus, and given the smaller animal's name because it sounded better, and the real Velociraptor, known from one of the most remarkable fossils ever found, is a more interesting animal than the invention.
The animal
Velociraptor mongoliensis was described in 1924 from a skull and a claw found in the Gobi Desert by the American Museum expedition, and it belongs to the dromaeosaurs, a family of small to medium theropods with a stiffened tail, a large sickle-shaped claw held off the ground on the second toe of each foot, and, as has been known since the 1990s, feathers. It was about two metres long from nose to tail tip, half a metre high at the hip and around fifteen to twenty kilograms, with a long low skull of about 25 centimetres holding some eighty teeth, and long arms with three-fingered hands. A specimen described in 2007 has quill knobs on its forearm, the bumps where the shafts of large feathers anchored, and no doubt remains that the arms carried wings, useless for flight in an animal of that weight but inherited from smaller flying ancestors.
The fighting dinosaurs
In 1971 a Polish-Mongolian expedition found a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops, a pig-sized horned dinosaur, buried together in the act of fighting. The raptor's sickle claw is in the throat of the Protoceratops, its right arm is in the Protoceratops's beak, which has bitten down on it, and the two seem to have been buried in an instant by a collapsing dune, in a struggle that had reached a stalemate. The fossil, kept in Ulaanbaatar and shown around the world, is the only direct record of a predatory dinosaur attacking its prey, and it answers a question about the claw: it was used to stab and hold at the neck rather than to slash the belly, as the films show, since the claw's curve is for gripping and its edge is not sharp.
How it hunted
The evidence, from the fighting pair, from the closest living relatives and from the biomechanics:
- •The sickle claw pinned prey, like the talon of a hawk on a rabbit, while the jaws did the killing, a method called raptor prey restraint proposed in 2011 from the way birds of prey use their feet
- •The wings and tail were for balance during the pin, flapping to keep the animal on top of struggling prey, which is what a hawk does
- •Prey was small: Protoceratops was about the raptor's own size, and a pterosaur bone found in a Velociraptor's gut in 2012 was probably scavenged
- •Pack hunting is unsupported: no bone bed of multiple Velociraptors exists, and the tooth isotopes of the related Deinonychus show the young ate differently from the adults, which coordinated packs do not do
- •It was probably nocturnal, since the ring of bones in its eye is proportioned like a night hunter's
Where the film's raptor came from
Michael Crichton, writing the novel in 1990, followed a book by Gregory Paul that lumped the American Deinonychus, three metres long and seventy kilograms, into the genus Velociraptor, and used the shorter name; the film's designers then made the animal larger still, and its skin was scaled because the feathers of dromaeosaurs were unknown until 1996, when the first feathered dinosaurs came out of China. A raptor of twenty kilograms with wings and the intelligence of a large bird would not have made the same monster, and the film's version has been more influential than any fossil, so that the discovery in 2007 of the quill knobs was reported worldwide as the news that the raptors had feathers, which palaeontologists had assumed for a decade.
Why it matters
Velociraptor and its family are the dinosaurs nearest to birds, and every discovery about them, the feathers, the wings, the brooding posture of their relative Oviraptor, the hunting style shared with hawks, has closed the gap between the two. The animal is also the best case of the way popular culture and science diverge: the name is known to everyone, and what it names is known to few. The real Velociraptor was a feathered, warm-blooded, probably nocturnal predator of the Cretaceous desert that pinned prey with its foot and once died with its claw in a Protoceratops's throat, and it deserves the fame the film gave to something else.
The takeaway
Velociraptor was a turkey-sized, feathered dromaeosaur of Late Cretaceous Mongolia, about two metres long and fifteen kilograms, with winged arms, a stiff tail and a sickle claw that it used to pin prey while its jaws killed, as the fossil of one locked in combat with a Protoceratops shows; there is no evidence it hunted in packs. The film's two-metre scaly raptor was modelled on its larger cousin Deinonychus and made before feathers were found on any dinosaur.